[mythtv-users] [mythtv] BrowserBased setup

Per Lundberg perlun at gmail.com
Thu Nov 25 08:38:10 UTC 2010


On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 12:19 AM, Michael T. Dean
<mtdean at thirdcontact.com> wrote:

> After all, why should we force the user to decide--before ever having
> started using TV playback--whether to enable captions by default, and if so,
> whether to use EIA-608 captions or EIA-708 captions.  Just give them a
> reasonable default (captions disabled) and remember changes (when captions
> are enabled, store which ones are in use, and use them until captions are
> disabled).

Good points. Coming from a (non MythTV)-developer background, what on
earth is EIA-608 or EIA-708 anyway? :-) I think MythTV should try to
autodetect that stuff. If both of them are available, *then* you have
a conflict. If only one of them is available, use that rather than to
force the user to answer a question which is really quite hard to
answer unless you know the details of caption technology...

Then, another point: you could argue that captions should *not* be
disabled by default. This varies very much depending on the region in
which you live. For people watching mostly programs in their own
language (which could arguably be said to be majority of the MythTV
users... which makes this point be moot), yes; captions should perhaps
be disabled (but then again, would these people have any captions
available in their DVB streams to begin with?).

For the rest of us, there are (at least) two groups of people: one is
people watching TV channels with the subtitles "burned in" to the DVB
stream itself. This is actually the case with the majority of the
Swedish TV channels, I think, and one key reason behind this is that
many people are still watching analogue TV (and they would need to
have it this way, unless they would have to go through the hassle of
enabling teletext-subtitles all the time...). We also have only one
language (Swedish) to care about, so no big deal.

In Finland, on the other hand, the situation is a lot different; DVB
subtitling (EIA?) is a lot more prevalent. One reason for this is the
obvious fact that Finland has two languages (Swedish and Finnish) and
certain broadcasts are being subtitled in both languages. One other
reason is that the DVB transition is much further gone here, making it
less of a problem for users.

I think the key question regarding subtitles is this: which disturbs a
user the most, having subtitles enabled when you don't need them, or
NOT getting the subtitles (captions) when you do need them? Now, I am
biased because I belong to the "people watching foreign-language
programs" group, and I prefer to have programs subtitled. Then again,
the biggest problem with MythTV right now is that the subtitle option
has been much, much too hard to find...

My proposal is this: why not make the subtitle option "undefined" at
start. Whenever you start watching LiveTV, and there are subtitles
available (in a language slight applicable for the user), why not
present a user-friendly dialogue, controllable by the 10' UI with
remote control, asking you "There are <language> subtitles available
for this program. Do you want to enable them?". This dialog should
have four alternatives. "Yes", "No", "Yes, always" and "No, always".

*This* is what I would call user-friendliness...
-- 
Best regards,
Per Lundberg


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